TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler is flipped off at Google+ for deleting his profile picture without notification earlier this week. Siegler, who's also a general partner at TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington's CrunchFund venture capital outfit, says Google simply erased a photo of him flipping the bird on Tuesday.

Siegler wrote on his blog that he wasn't upset at Google's "ridiculously prudish" stance on what he deemed "a little PG-13 fun," though he did mention that he's posted the same picture with no repercussions "on Twitter and elsewhere." Instead, he's miffed that "no one bothered to tell me or warn me before they just went into my account and deleted the picture."

After posting the photo a second time, Siegler said he received this response from Google's Alex Joseph:

As the first point of interaction with a user's profile, all profile photos on Google+ are reviewed to make sure they are in line with our User Content and Conduct Policy. Our policy page states, "Your Profile Picture cannot include mature or offensive content." Your profile photo was taken down as a violation of this policy. If you have further questions about the policies on Google+ you can visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/content.html, or click the "Content Policy" link located in the footer of Google+ pages.

The original photo appears in Siegler's blog post and the tech writer has since replaced his Google+ profile pic with one where the offending middle finger is obscured by a "g+" logo (pictured above). That sanitized photo is apparently acceptable to the Google+ police and was still up on Siegler's profile as of Thursday afternoon.

That would have been that, but Anderson decided to chime in and really bring the meta to an otherwise ho-hum dust-up over user rights and ownership in the social networking era.

The MySpace founder took Google's side in the affair, saying the company's policy towards "mature and offensive content" is commonplace among social networksit's just that Google+ has the algorithmic muscle to actually enforce it.

Nor was Anderson remiss in heading off the predictable objections to his opinion at the pass.

"In any case, I would respectfully submit that we, the users of Google+ (and Facebook or Twitter) don't need to see you flipping us off, nor do we need to see you naked, or displaying something else generally considered offensive," he wrote. "When a social network let's that stuff slide, it turns into a cesspool that no one wants to visit ... sorta like MySpace was."

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
More »